Train heads to FDR bash

BY BOB MCMILLAN

Posted 1/28/18

Looking back in history, here were some of the happenings in the Cookeville area for the week of Jan. 24-29 as recorded in the pages of the Herald-Citizen:1932The Cookeville Home Telephone Company is …

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Train heads to FDR bash

Looking back in history, here were some of the happenings in the Cookeville area for the week of Jan. 24-29 as recorded in the pages of the Herald-Citizen:

1932

The Cookeville Home Telephone Company is growing. It's added 13 new subscribers to its phone system this month alone. Now, 535 Cookeville homes are tied together by telephone lines strung about the town.

Running the company are new officers who were elected this month. They are B.M. Car, president; Howard Draper, vice president; B.C. Huddleston, secretary; E.H. Buck, treasurer; W.H. Barr, general manager; and Sid Phillips, local manager. Mrs. Phillips is assistant local manager.

The L&N and B&O railroads are offering a special deal for those who'd like to go to Washington for the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 4.

Here's the offer: For $31 per person, you can take the train from Nashville (you'll have to ride the Tennessee Central to get there from here) to Washington, see the festivities and, rather than having to pay for a hotel room too, you can sleep in a Pullman rail car overnight. The price of the special ticket will bring you back home too. (Jan. 26, 1932)

1940

Now your family vacation doesn't have to be just a memory, says Webb's Pharmacy. You can film it with new a Bell and Howell personal home movie camera, the Filmo.

Webb's, which announced this week that it's selling the new Filmo, says it's reliable. Bell and Howell has been in business 30 years now and has been making home movie cameras for the last 16 years. Come by and try one out, says Webb's.

In his weekly column, Sen. Albert Gore (Sr.) explains just why it is that most Southern legislators are opposing the proposed Anti-Lynching Act.

Gore says that it's not a case of the South favoring lynching. But Southern legislators say the federal act is a violation of states' rights. (Jan. 26, 1940)

1944

Country music star Roy Acuff says he's running for governor, and the newspaper this week in a page one editorial says the established political machine had better watch out. Acuff is a fiddler, and fiddlers have a certain way with the public.

"In our 50 years in politics, we have never known one of these fiddlers to be defeated for any office if they were at all qualified," warns the editorial.

Bob Taylor was a fiddler. He ran to represent Tennessee's First District. He won. "He did it by walking across the district fiddling and speaking at every crossroad and schoolhouse." And he later went on to become a three-term governor of Tennessee.

His brother, Alf, who was successful in Tennessee politics, had even more going for him. "He was a fiddler and a fox hunter."

A fiddler and flour salesman, known as 'Pass the Biscuit Papa' O'Daniel, won the governorship in Texas six years ago without the help of a fat campaign chest. He just fiddled and passed the hat around — all the way to the governor's office.

The list goes on. Happy Chandler, one of those fiddlers, won the governor's race in Kentucky a while back and in Louisiana, a fiddler named Davis became governor.

The editorial says they all beat the old-time regulars and their machines because they were well-traveled, had their ears to the ground, and knew the people.

So the paper warns the state's mainline politicians to watch out for "these boys of the road." (Jan. 24, 1944)

1956

The city will sound the fire alarm at 6:55 on Tuesday, signaling not a fire but the launch of the 1956 Mothers March on Polio.

Mrs. George Shanks, chairman of the drive, says that when the whistles stop blowing, mothers will fan out all over the city, going door to door to raise money for research to beat the dreaded disease.

The City Commission this week agreed to spend $250,000 to build a 200x266-foot masonry building on a 12-acre site on Locust Road in north Cookeville.

The city hopes to lure an industry to the site. The region is losing thousands of residents to northern factories where the jobs are. The push is on to create new jobs here, but so far, no prospects have been announced for the new building.

"It's zero-hour at Sebastapol," says the ad for the movie this week at the Putnam Drive-in. It's "Charge of the Lancers," starring Paulette Goddard and Jean Pierre Aumont. (Jan. 26, 1956)

1963

A record cold wave continues here. For the past two weeks, temperatures have been below freezing, and last night, the mercury dropped to minus 15 in Cookeville. Monterey residents are reporting lows of 24 below.

That beats the 1951 record, says Cookeville weather observer C.K. Flatt. It only got down to 11 below that winter.

And ice on the roads is causing problems still. Salt, which is only effective at 32 degrees or higher, hasn't been any help. Mail trucks and delivery trucks from Nashville are running late.

The train didn't do much better. This week cold weather snapped a Tennessee Central track at Silver Point right in front of the home of Charles Smith.

Smith says, "I heard a racket and thought the train was a little noisier than usual. When the cars turned over, it really made a fuss."

Outside, cars from a TC train were scattered like toys along a quarter of a mile section of track. (Jan. 24, 1963)

1972

Jerry Maynard was named principal of Sycamore Elementary this week, ending a standoff between the Putnam School Board and Supt. Walter Warren Shanks.

The board rejected the Overton County teacher Shanks recommended for the job in November, and Shanks sounded doubtful last month that he'd find another suitable candidate any time soon.

But he said this week that his search led him to Maynard, a teacher at Capshaw who was not an original candidate for the position. But Shanks said he was "elated" when he learned that Maynard has every bit of certification needed for the post.

Maynard is a Putnam native, and the board says it wanted to hire someone qualified who was also 'local.' Maynard has taught in Michigan for two years and for three years in the Metro Nashville system. He's been at Capshaw for the last two years.

A 12-page agreement signed this week in Paris brought the nation's longest war to an end. Richard Nixon says that the treaty meets all the conditions for the US to have "peace with honor" and quit the Vietnam War.

In its ten years, the Vietnam War has handed the United States 350,000 casualties and deeply scarred the nation. (Jan. 29, 1972)